Tongan Olympian ‘Amini Fonua, recognised as “openly gay athlete”

Congratulations 'Amini, your courage to openly tell the world your sex orientation will help to educate the Tongan community to accept Gay people as God's creation too. Tongan Christians cannot live a double life of preaching Jesus love and hate Gay people at the same time.

God created MAN and WOMAN. God DID NOT create HALF-MAN and HALF-WOMAN
'ai ho'o facts ke mo'oni pea ke toki ha'u 'o lea he me'a koia. Pea kataki editor 'o monitor e ngaahi comments ta'emo'oni koeni mo e tukuaki'i hala 'o e kau lotu he 'oku 'uluaki hala pe 'ene lea te'eki a'u ki he poini!

First of all, congratulations Mr. Fonua for qualifying and participating in an athlete's dream come true - The Olympics. Your hard work as an athlete has brought you far, as demonstrated with your performance.

In terms of speaking about Mr. Fonua's self identified sexual orientation, I concur with Leka Muna. Mr. Fonua you are a brave individual that not only serves as a role model in the athletic world, but also for those individuals that are scared to be who they were truly meant to be. Having been a part of the higher education system within the United States and participating in courses that included: Ethnic Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Feminist Social Ethics, Bible Literature, Sociology, and Anthropology, I am coming from a well rounded academic perspective.

In regards to "God created Man and Woman," before I even try to deconstruct your internalized hatred towards those who identify with the gay community, let's start off with definitions. A man is "an adult human male" and a woman is "an adult human female." So God created male and female. The terms man and woman are socially defined terms used to identify adult human females and males. The majority of this world has been taught to think of sex as binary either male of female . . . however, studies have shown that there are individuals that are born with both male and female parts, therefore your argument "God DID NOT create HALF-MAN and HALF-WOMAN" is indeed incorrect- science proves it.

Also, by definition sex and sexual orientation don't go hand in hand . . . so I don't know where you're going with it.

I'm not trying to specifically pick out individuals, but I'm just standing up for the marginzized communities that are ostrasized and hated within our own Tongan community. Well, I'm defending those that are too scared to speak out.

There is a lot more to dive into, but I'll leave it as is, unless someone else wants to bring another academic argument that will not refrain to religion as a defense or throw insults because you can't come up with a valid argument as to why it's not okay for same sex individuals to have relations.

If this forum decides to delete this comment because of it's liberal nature, that's fine . . . I'll take my perspective and academically supported views elsewhere.